FOREST RIGHTS. 67 



(d) Carefully prevent damage to the estate, its roads, 

 fences, works, etc., especially if caused by the removal of 

 forest produce. 



(e) Carefully watch against encroachments, and all kinds 

 of forest offences, injury to boundary pillars and other marks. 



(/) When any licences or concessions are allowed, see that 

 this is always done by written or printed permission so worded 

 as to make it clear that no right of a prescriptive character 

 can arise. 



(#) Exercise any rights the forest estate may possess over 

 other estates, and all claims to labour, or payments, all rights 

 of receiving help in case of forest fire or other calamity, or 

 receiving information (which may be imposed by the forest or 

 other law). 



SECTION II. GENERAL ACCOUNT OF FOREST EIGHTS OR 

 SERVITUDES. 



1. Nature and Origin of Forest Rights. 



As already stated, it frequently happens that persons 

 (sometimes individuals, sometimes legal persons or corpora- 

 tions) possess rights over a forest (or other) property which 

 belongs to someone else. These are permanent rights, which 

 have nothing to do with a contract, or temporary lease, mort- 

 gage, etc. In that case the forest or other estate over which the 

 limited right exists is called the servient estate it is burdened 

 with the right. These rights are called by various names. 

 The Koman lawyers called them servitudes (because the 

 burdened property was made to serve the purpose of the 

 holder of the right). In English some were called easements 

 (i.e. one kind of them were so, of which presently), others 

 rights-of- common. In India, the Legislature (abandoning this 

 distinction) has called them all " easements."* Such rights 

 depend partly on grants, or some form of written title, 



* Origin of forest rights. In Germany these rights often arose out of the old 

 agricultural communities whose territory or Mark had a portion or borderland of 

 waste and forest which (in some sense, at any rate) belonged to the inhabitants. 

 From the time of Charlemagne these border-forests were appropriated by the 

 empire or by powerful landowners and town corporations, and the original owners 

 became mere right- holders. Waste lands attached to villages in India have also 



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